SAN JOSE — A group of student activists are calling for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office to pick up the pace with clearing marijuana-related convictions that have been rendered moot by the legalization of marijuana.

Prosecutors say they want that too, and that they have lawyers in place to swiftly review what they anticipate will be thousands of cases, once they get a master list of eligible cases from the state Department of Justice this summer,.

Students Against Mass Incarceration, a collection of students attending San Jose State University, rallied Wednesday in front of the District Attorney’s Office headquarters in North San Jose, asking why the county was behind places like San Francisco and Los Angeles in clearing convictions under Proposition 64, the state law signed in 2016 that legalized recreational marijuana and sales. The proposition made hundreds of thousands of related criminal convictions in California eligible for expungement.

To Elizabeth Ramirez Moreno, a member of the student group, there is no time to waste, given the effects that such convictions have had on people’s employment and business potential.

“It’s a matter of getting people those opportunities, and getting them to be able to be successful,” she told ABC7, this news organization’s media partner.

Prosecutors in the rest of state’s counties, like Santa Clara and San Mateo, are awaiting the release of a list of eligible cases from the state Department of Justice, which has until July 1 to produce it under a subsequent law, last fall’s AB 1793. That law, authored by Alameda-based Assemblyman Rob Bonta, also sets a July 1, 2020 deadline for the eligible cases to be stricken.

Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney David Angel said his office has already cleared from 400 to 500 marijuana-related convictions involving defendants who contacted the district attorney’s office either directly or through their lawyers. He added that generating a list of eligible cases in-house would spend resources, only to duplicate efforts by the California DOJ, the state’s repository of criminal conviction information. The department, he said, can produce a more comprehensive and accurate list than his office could.

Once prosecutors get the list, Angel said, he expects that the cases, expected to be in the thousands, will be reviewed and endorsed for clearance well before the one-year deadline set under Bonta’s bill. The exception, he said, would be any case that is accompanied another violent or serious crime.

“It should be done within a year, we’re optimistic it will be quite a bit faster,” Angel said. “And we prefer to do it once, comprehensively and right.”

Daniel Montero, a member of San Jose Cannabis Equity, noted that one effect of such convictions have been ironic in the sense that they have denied affected people from participating in the same marijuana trade — now legal and booming — that landed them in court years ago.

“We are your brothers, your sisters, your mothers, your fathers. We are veterans, who have been criminalized during the war on drugs,” Montero told ABC7. “Again, cannabis is legal now, but it wasn’t always in the past.”

Robert Salonga is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering criminal justice and public safety for The Mercury News. A San Jose native, he attended UCLA and has a Master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He previously reported in Washington, D.C., Salinas and the East Bay, and is a middling triathlete. Reach him the low-tech way at 408-920-5002.

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